In the packaging of fluids such as soft drinks, identifying labels are applied to vessels such as plastic bottles. The use of tubular plastic sleeve labels that are telescoped over a vessel is enjoying increasing popularity. Machines for applying such tubular labels to bottles or other objects such as the machines shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,412,876 issued Nov. 1, 1983 to Bernard Lerner et al. under the title "Labeling Apparatus," and U.S. Pat. No. 4,620,888 issued Nov. 4, 1986 to William Easter et al., also entitled "Labeling Apparatus," have enjoyed commercial success. More recently, a machine described in co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 07/963,059 filed Oct. 27, 1992 and entitled "High Speed Sleever" (The High Speed Labeler), has been developed for applying sleeve labels to bottles at speeds measured in the hundreds of bottles per minute and it is also enjoying commercial success.
Bottles made of a plastic known as PET are now widely used for bottling such things as soft drinks. A problem presented by these bottles is that they can be dented quite easily, and once dented, lose their original shape which is typically round in cross section. If a bottle with a relatively severe dent is fed to a labeling station, it can, and often will, cause a jam. In the past, the typical solution has been for an operator to visually observe bottles being conveyed to a labeling station and to manually remove those bottles which, through prior processing, have become misshapen to a degree where they are apt to cause a jam.
With The High Speed Labeler, visual inspection and manual removal is, at best, difficult since bottles are fed to the labeler and labeled at rates typically of the order of 500 per minute. Accordingly, the high throughput speeds have exacerbated the existing problem of misshapen bottles
While the potential for machine jams with misshapen bottles has been a major part of the problem, it is not the entire problem. Where misshapen bottles have been manually observed and removed, typically no attempt has been made to salvage the bottles and make them usable. Rather, such bottles have been discarded typically to be ground up and recycled, thus adding to the cost of the bottling process.